Blog Post

Escape

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’ve been trying for days to come up with something to write about for this week’s blog, and I keep coming up empty. It hasn’t been a particularly eventful week.

So I’m backtracking a bit. A couple of weeks ago in my songwriting class, we were given the assignment to write a song that included two things: dialogue, and a road we’d been on many times. I found my mind wandering back to my third year of Bible college, the year that I took my first tentative steps out of the closet, a year when everything I thought I knew slipped from under my feet. It was a year of growing pains, and anticipation of major change on the horizon, a year of yearning for freedom and utter terror facing that much unknown. And I thought of my best friend at the time (who’s still one of my best friends, even if we don’t talk a whole lot these days), and the long, looping drives we would take around the lake behind campus, singing along to mediocre pop music that we weren’t supposed to enjoy, let alone know all the words to.

I don’t ever have any desire to be back in that place. But distance has tinted those drives, in particular, with a bittersweet nostalgia, and that nostalgia came out in this song. It’s a rough recording, but I hope you enjoy it.

One Rule

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

Technology is a fascinating thing. Thanks to the power of the internet, I’m not only able to put part of my life out in words for public scrutiny on a weekly basis, but I’m able to see who my audience is — at least, I can see what countries/states you’re coming from. It’s a regular reminder for me that the world is both vast and yet small enough to be this interconnected.

A couple of days ago I had a website stats first: I was able to see the search terms someone put in that led them to my little corner of the interwebs. The query? What do I do if I’m transmasculine. Well, honey, I don’t know if what you found here was helpful, or if you’ll ever be back, and that is a loaded and nuanced question if I ever saw one, but I’m going to give you the simplest answer I have:

You do what you need to do to stay alive.

If that means staying in the closet because you’re not in a safe space, then that’s okay. If it means tearing down the walls and being out and loud and proud, that’s okay, too. Educate yourself. Find your options. Find ways to be more comfortable in your skin and your brain. But mostly, stay alive. (Are you familiar with Kate Bornstein? She is fabulous, really into this idea of staying alive, has written some wonderful things about ways to do it, and has started a #stayalive hashtag movement on Twitter.)

Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you might believe about yourself, know that I believe that your life has value. And maybe in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t make a difference to you. But maybe it does, and that’s reason enough to say it. You, yes, you, my friend, are valuable. Your mere existence is revolutionary. People will try to tell you otherwise, but I promise they’re wrong.

I don’t believe that the “it gets better” rhetoric is actually helpful at all. Because sometimes, it doesn’t ever really get better to the extent that we want it to. But someday, even if things aren’t the best you can imagine, they might be better than they are now. And sometimes that hope makes holding on a little easier.

Hang in there, kiddo.

New Life

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

Last Monday, my biological family welcomed its newest and tiniest member. My brother and sister-in-law had their first kid, and I got my first nephew.

I am thrilled beyond words and proud enough to burst buttons. Being an uncle (even if I’m not officially allowed to call myself that) is pretty much my favourite thing ever. I’m still, a week and a half later, showing off his pictures whenever I get the chance. I want to knit all the baby things, and it’s killing me that I won’t get to meet this kid in person until he’s already over a month old.

I’ve been thinking and feeling a lot of things in the ten days since my nephew was born, mostly about family and where I fit and the fact that I’m frustrated that I’m not allowed to define myself in this situation, but that I love this kid to pieces and have since I found out he was coming and so I’m going along with being painted into boxes that I don’t fit because I want to be a part of his life and that matters more than me being able to breathe freely.

I want to give my nephew safe spaces in which he can be himself. I want to do everything I can to ensure that he is always surrounded by the love that surrounded him on the day that he first entered the world. I want him to know that he is special.

So here’s to you, little one. This game of life is not an easy one, but I am determined to make sure you have plenty of support along the way.

Finding My Voice: Part 2

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

So remember last week how I said I was going to perform in a songwriting showcase over the weekend, and I was terrified?

Well, I did the terrifying thing. Not only that, but I had fun doing it!

Those of us who performed had the option of doing two songs, so I actually performed more than one thing, and it went much better than I was afraid it would. Many thanks to my instructor, Steve Dawson, for organizing the showcase.

I had my partner record a video of the performance so I could share it with you. The camera died about ten seconds short of the end of my second song, but it’s close enough. Unfortunately, if I compress the video down to a size that I can upload, you can’t really see what’s going on. So I’m just going to post the audio here. Enjoy!

 

Finding My Voice

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

For the past eight weeks, I have been taking a songwriting class. I’ve written roughly half a dozen songs, most of which I’ve played for my classmates.

On Sunday, for the first time since high school, I am getting up on a stage and singing. For the first time ever, I will be publicly singing something I wrote.

I’ve watched my words performed on stage by other people. I’ve never actually performed something of my own before.

And I am terrified.

When I was in high school, I sang with our youth group worship band a handful of times. Every time I stepped behind a mic, my voice jumped up an octave. Having a high voice bothered me then, too, even though being trans was nowhere on my radar.

My voice is significantly lower now than it was when I started on testosterone almost four months ago. (Case in point.) And I’m more comfortable in myself now than I was in high school. And I’ve performed on a smaller scale in front of my classmates. And the audience will be almost entirely comprised of people in songwriting classes, or their families and friends, so I really don’t need to be worried.

But I am.

I’m afraid of being misgendered. Because my voice is not so low that it doesn’t happen anymore.

I’m afraid that I’ll get up there and forget all the words that I wrote, or how to play the music.

I’m afraid that my voice will get lost in falsetto.

But I’m going to do it anyway. And I guess, in the end, that’s what matters. Right?

My Hips Don’t Lie (I Think)

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

(Apologies for the late post today, folks! Thanks to a combination of lots of little weird things not going quite right, my whole week has felt rather off, and I didn’t realize until I was about to pass out last night that I didn’t have a blog written yet. Oops! Anyway, I hope this one makes you chuckle. Enjoy!)

I am not a small human.

I will grant you that I only stand 5’5″ tall, but I am a stocky fellow. I take up space. And I have always (at least since puberty number one) had hips.

Now don’t get me wrong: hips can be useful. They’re great for balancing things like laundry baskets carried in one arm so your other hand is free to unlock and open doors. If I was planning on ever bearing children, I’m sure I would find other instances in which I was thankful for my hips.

But when you’re trying to achieve a more masculine presentation, hips are annoying at best, and dysphoria-inducing at worst. For someone like me, whose chest can be fairly well concealed by a binder, hips turn into one of the bigger reasons I wind up being read as a woman.

Last week, in preparation for our trip to Minnesota, I found myself tackling a mountain of laundry. We live on the second floor of our building; the laundry room is down the stairs, out the door, around the corner, through another door, and down a few more stairs. For someone like yours truly, whose back and knees tend not to love stairs in the first place, laundry is kind of an extra obnoxious experience. But I was determined to get it done. So I packed up a mesh bag full of clothes, flung it over my shoulder, hauled it down the stairs, and started a couple of loads.

Once the laundry was dry, I actually did that thing that I’m told real adults do and folded everything. I then put the laundry in one of our small laundry baskets, picked it up, swing it around under my right arm, and braced it against my right hip.

That was what was supposed to happen, anyway.

Only…I couldn’t find any way to balance the basket without tilting the whole load of freshly washed shirts and socks and a wonky sort of angle in relation to my body, shoving the corner of the basket into my side under my ribcage.

It made getting the laundry back upstairs (through four closed doors, two of which were locked) quite the journey.

I had known for a while that my butt was smaller, but I never, ever, ever expected that my hips would slim down in the least. And my hips are definitely still there. But…they’re not as there as they used to be.

I’m not complaining. But it’s weird to suddenly find yourself unsure of what your body, the body you’ve spent 25 years getting to know, can and cannot do.

The Naked I: Insides Out

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Assuming that things go roughly according to plan, but the time this posts, my partner and I will be very nearly to Minnesota, where we are headed for a long weekend to spend time with family and friends…

…and to celebrate the opening weekend of a show that I have a piece in!

So I’m going to take a break from life updates and plug the show: The Naked I: Insides Out.

The show has been created and is being produced by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities, a wonderful theatre company that focuses specifically on work by women and transgender artists. The following is the show description from the 20% Theatre Company website:

20% Theatre Company Twin Cities is thrilled to present the world premiere of THE NAKED I: INSIDES OUT – the 3rd in a series of NAKED I plays that explore queer and trans* experiences through monologues, short scenes, and spoken word poems. This production will take place at Intermedia Arts February 13-23, 2014 and will feature the work of over 100 LGBTQ artists and allies – including contributing writers, directors, performers, designers, technicians, and more! This show will include 25 pieces chosen out of 119 submissions! 

There are an infinite number of stories to be told, and as a company focused on social change, human rights, and the voice of queer and trans* artists, 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities is determined to tell as many of these stories as we can – thus creating/producing a new NAKED I show every few years.

The first Naked I production, The Naked I: Monologues from Beyond the Binary, by Tobias K. Davis, was produced by 20% in 2009. In 2011, 20% put out a call for submissions for a second Naked I production: The Naked I: Wide Open. My partner and I both had pieces in that show, and I ended up doing the layout work for getting the script into a publishable book format. It was an incredible experience, not just for us, but for everyone involved and everyone who came to see the show (which sold out two runs, was in the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and toured around the country a bit in 2012).

Last year, when the call for submissions for the next iteration of the Naked I went out, I submitted a handful of pieces, and one of them wound up in the show. (I did the book layout for this script, as well.) The Naked I: Insides Out is every bit as beautiful and important as its predecessors. If you are in/near/able to get to the Twin Cities in the next couple of weekends, I strongly encourage you to check it out. The first couple of performances have sold out already, and I’m sure the others will as well, so if you’re interested, be sure to grab your tickets (sliding scale $5-$25) at that first link I posted. (If you can’t catch the show, all of those links attached to the titles up there will take you to Amazon, where you can pick up a copy of the script. It’s powerful stuff, and well worth the read. Also, I made it look extra pretty.)

We’re going with a bunch of wonderful friends to the sold-out performance this Saturday, and I am so excited. I had a little bit of contact with the director of my piece, but I really wanted to just let go of this rare piece of work that I’m actually pretty proud of and see what happened to it in the hands of the director and actor who are taking it on. I have every confidence that it will be amazing. I am thrilled and humbled and honored to be a part of something so important and poignant and hard and lovely. While a part of me will always be terrified waiting for the reaction of the audience to the words I’ve written, I still can’t wait to share this with the world. It’s an immense privilege to be able to tell my stories, and, as an extension, the stories of the other people like me, and it’s a privilege I hope I never take lightly. Stories have the power to change the world, and this production is full of world-changing stories.

Three Months

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Tomorrow (February 7, 2014) marks three months that I’ve been on testosterone!

It’s been quite a journey. And I’ve finally gotten my first lab results back (a lab visit, a lost test result, a second lab visit, and two weeks later) as of Monday, which has been great. I’m continuing on my initial dosage, since my progress has been good (estrogen is negligibly above the goal level [or was, back in December, and is less than half what it started at], and testosterone is well within the goal range [more than ten times where it started]). It’s nice to have some concrete numbers to back up the changes I’m seeing and feeling day to day.

Things that have changed in the last three months:

  • My voice. Holy shit, my voice. (Pop down two posts for a sound clip comparing November and January: it’s even a bit deeper now.) My voice was the thing that most bothered me prior to starting on T (and was one of the only things that made me dysphoric), and I am loving the changes I’m hearing. I’m much more comfortable answering the phone at work, and although I’ve been singing in a high tenor range for years, it’s gotten a lot more comfortable.
  • My hair. Mostly, there’s more of it. On my stomach, my arms, my legs, my back (not so happy about this recent development), and on my face. Up to this point I mostly just have peach fuzz on my face, but there’s been enough of it that I’ve shaved a few times, and I’m noticing more dark hairs coming in between shaves, particularly on/under my chin.
  • The distribution of my body fat. My butt is smaller. My hips might be, too (though not much…thanks to my skeletal structure I’ll always have wide-ish hips). My stomach is maybe a little bigger. They’re not huge changes, but they’re big enough that I’ve noticed.
  • My appetite. Prior to starting T, it wasn’t uncommon for me to skip meals, either out of distraction or because I simply wasn’t hungry. I joked that I had the metabolism of a stationary boulder. After starting T, I was suddenly hungry ALL THE TIME. It’s evened out a bit (finally…feeding a teenage boy is expensive), but I still am hungry way more often than I used to be.
  • My need for sleep. Whether it means I’m a teenage boy or an old man, I’m not sure, but I’m going to be earlier and waking up later than I was before.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the changes I’m seeing. While I don’t love everything about it (like the handful of back hairs that have shown up, or the fact that I can never seem to get the injections in my right leg to go as smoothly as the ones in my left), I definitely don’t have any regrets about starting down this road. I look forward to seeing what new changes lie ahead!

It’s Starting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

In the weirdness of this week (my office was closed Monday and Tuesday due to dangerously cold temperatures), I completely forgot that today was Thursday, so I didn’t have a post prepared for this morning. My apologies to all! But, here I am. Better late than never, right?

It’s just as well that I didn’t have anything written up earlier, because I was having a hell of a time coming up with a story for you all until today, anyway.

Some folks in my office are still pretty clueless about the fact that I identify as transmasculine. I get “girl” and “lady” still, sometimes, and while it’s irritating, generally people mean well, and I try not to get too upset about it. It’s not like I’m particularly assertive or good at standing up for myself, so unless someone around the office who’s figured it out (or been told directly) lets it slip, how are they going to know? My facial hair is still peach fuzz, and since they see me every day, my voice change isn’t all that noticeable.

Our power went out at the office today, and during the half hour that I spent wandering around, feeling lost (I work in IT: no power means I really have nothing to do), a coworker and I were collectively referred to as “ladies.” It didn’t get too far under my skin, but it added to the general blah-ness of my day. Once the power came back on, I got back to work and tried to forget about it.

Sometime later, my phone rang.

“This is Alyx.”

“Hello, my name is [name]. How are you today, sir?”

It turned out the call was a solicitor from HP who had wanted to talk to my department head about servers, but, failing to reach anything but his voicemail, had been directed to me by the operator. Since I am but a lowly administrative assistant, it was a short conversation.

But I was ecstatic.

Never, not once, in my whole life, have I ever been “sirred” solely on the sound of my voice. In fact, in the past, if people had initially called me “sir,” they backpedalled as soon as I opened my mouth. When I worked the drive thru at a coffee shop, I loathed hearing my voice over the headset, cringing at the inevitable responses that included the word “ma’am.”

Until today.

Whether the person on the other end of the line changed their mind about my gender after I stammered a reply, I don’t know. And I don’t really care. All that really matters to me is that the first impression someone had, based solely on my voice, was that I was a masculine individual.

I’m still smiling.

Is That My Voice?

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

No huge text post this week, as I’m focusing on possible changes to the site (possibly moving it off Tumblr, expanding things, etc). However, for your entertainment and mine, here’s something I discovered this week: HOLY SHIT MY VOICE HAS CHANGED IN TWO MONTHS.

I am recording a chapter of The Phantom Tollbooth each month to track my voice changes. The first part of this clip is from chapter one, recorded 7 November, 2013. The second part is from chapter three, recorded 18 January, 2014. I knew my voice was a bit lower, but hadn’t thought it was all that extreme until I listened to these two side by side. I’ve been giggling about it for days.